Senate Votes to Make Offshore Drilling Revenue for Wilderness Conservation Permanent

On 12 February 2019, in a 92 to 8 vote, the U.S. Senate passed a 662-page conservation package that would protect 1.3 million acres as wilderness.

What’s more, due to how it is funded, the Congressional Budget Office predicts the legislation would save taxpayers $9 million dollars, which is one reason it is expected to also pass in the U.S. House of Representatives (after its mid-February recess), after which it will be up to President Trump to sign or veto the package of bills.

Among its many provisions, the legislation withdraws 370,000 acres of land around two national parks from mining (North Cascades and Yellowstone). It also permanently authorizes a program to spend offshore drilling revenue on conservation efforts. That program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), had expired on 1 October 2018.

Making the LWCF permanent has broad bipartisan support. Unlike other programs that rely on tax dollars, LWCF funding comes from deposits made in a special account of lease fees from offshore oil and natural gas drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Every year, it collects up to $900 million. The collection of those revenues, which have provided over 50 years of funding to LWCF conservation and recreation priorities, are made permanent in the Senate legislation. It is not, however, mandated that all of the money in the funds be spend on conservation efforts.

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who introduced the package, called it a “compilation of about 120 bills relating to lands, to waters, to sportsmen’s access, conservation provisions . . . This is the first time that we have been able to advance a lands package in about five years . . . It is significant in not only the many small and parochial lands matters that we have dealt with, but what passage of these bills allows for in terms of economic development.”